With the growing popularity of pervasive devices and the increasing bandwidth of wireless communications, users want to have access to snore services at their finger tips while traveling without a PC. For example, a mobile salesperson may need services such as company inventory lookup, customer order status check, customer address lookup, etc.
A Web service is a software system identified by a URI, whose public interfaces and bindings are defined and described using XML. Its definition can be discovered by other software systems. These systems may then interact with the Web service in a manner prescribed by its definition, using XML based messages conveyed by Internet protocols.
Traditionally, developers had to write a program to enable the access to a web service. For non-developers, it's very difficult for them to find a program, for each web service that they need to access. Also, writing a program for each web service results in substantial cost in developing and support. Especially there is not, yet an efficient way available to pervasive device users to make use of multiple web services is a configurable and continuous fashion.
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/063,708: “DYNAMIC EXTENSIBLE LIGHTWEIGHT ACCESS TO WEB SERVICES FOR PERVASIVE DEVICES” filed Feb. 23, 2005; incorporated herein by reference, discloses a Generic Mobile Web Services (GMWS) manager that provides mobile clients with access to web Services. The GMWS manager provides an interface between Web Services and mobile clients {handheld PDAs for example}. The GMWS manager maintains a registry of supported Web Services and metadata attributes about the Web Services and the mobile client, information is transferred between a client and a registered web service by way of the GMWS manager based on attributes available to the GMWS manager.
US Patent Application Pub. No. 2005/0015491A1, “SYSTEM, METHODS, AND ARTICLES OF MANUFACTURE FOR DYNAMICALLY PROVIDING WEB SERVICES” filed May 16, 2003, incorporated herein by reference, discloses dynamically providing web services in a distributed system, in one embodiment, a distribution server uses a generic interface to invoke any one of a plurality of web services based on a user request at a client system. The distribution server provides content information that a client system uses to display a customized web page for an authorized user. When the user selects content on a customized web page associated with a web service, the client's system sets data values in one or more hidden fields and provides the fields to the distribution server. The server passes the field information to the selected web service to produce result data. The distribution server may use the result data and collected format data to generate the content information that is used to generate the customized web page for the authorized user. Embodiments of the present invention enable the distributed system to modify a web service without having to reprogram any consumers of the modified web service. Further, the distribution server is configured such that it dynamically and automatically determines any web services that a user may access and provides access to the authorized web services through the generic interface.
US Patent Application Pub. No. 2002/0174117A1 “MOBILE WEB SERVICES” filed May 15, 2001, incorporated herein by reference, describes a method is disclosed to enable a mobile phone or wireless PDA to discover Internet businesses and services by accessing the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) registry. The method facilitates the formation of a query to the UDDI registry for the wireless device user. The method constructs a personal user profile of the user's UDDI searching strategies and Internet accessing preferences. The user profile can be used as a shortcut for online or offline queries to the UDDI registry or for accessing pages from web sites, in response to the user's entry of abbreviated inputs to the wireless device. The method is embodied as programmed instructions which may be executed within the user's wireless device to query the UDDI registry. Alternately, method is embodied as programmed instructions which may foe executed within a separate knowledge engine server to query the UDDI registry in response to commands from the user's wireless device. The server can be used to cache files accessed from web sites, for selective forwarding to the user's wireless device.
US Patent Application No. 2005/0071423A1: “System, Apparatus, and Method for Providing Web Services on Mobile Devices” Filed Sep. 26, 2003 and incorporated herein by reference provides Web services from a mobile device. In one configuration, a method involves forming a Web service message at a first network entity. The Web service message is targeted for a mobile terminal. A request is directed to a locator arrangement to assist in processing the Web service message. The Web service message is sent to the mobile terminal utilizing the locator arrangement. The Web service message is sent to the mobile terminal using a mobile services transport protocol and processed at the mobile terminal.
Browsers do not provide a means to access Web Services directly. Customized Web pages and programs have to be developed for each web service to be accessed. This results in substantial cost in developing and support. Furthermore, using a browser to access Web Services from web pages involves extra network RTT (round trip time) as the customized web page and programs must be downloaded before the browser is capable of accessing the Web Service. With the communication, bandwidth limitation on pervasive devices, extra RTT has undesirable impact on the performance of the system.
Another approach is to make a customized client application that talks to the service for each web service. The disadvantage of this approach is that eventually the number of applications will outgrow the memory/storage limit of the device as the services increase. The total cost to develop, support and purchase each application is substantial.
SOA {Service Oriented Architecture} provides a perspective of software architecture that defines the use of services to support the requirements of software users. In an SOA environment, resources an a network are made available as independent services that can be accessed without knowledge of their underlying platform implementation. SOA is usually based on Web services standards (e.g., using SOAP or REST) that have gained broad industry acceptance. These standards also provide greater interoperability and some protection from lock-in to proprietary vendor software. The present invention, is in the domain of SOA enablement on pervasive (mobile) devices. The invention enables integration and continuous web service invocation through simple configuration.
There are solutions offered to enable web service access from pervasive device by different vendors. For example, BlackBerry™ Mobile Data System v4.1 from RESEARCH IN MOTION (RIM®) allows a generated web service client to be pushed to the device so that user can use the client to access the corresponding web service. IBM® Web Services Tool Kit offers “tools and run-time environments that allow development of applications that use Web services on small mobile devices, gateway devices, and intelligent controllers”. However, the existing tools or products do not provide a mechanism for the client/device to call another web service using the result returned from a previous web service access.